MICHAEL HASTINGS

Michael Hastings was brought up by his mother in Brixton in a local authority flat. He went to a number of schools in south London, then at fifteen he took up an apprenticeship in bespoke tailoring. He had ambitions to be a sportsman and he showed promise in boxing and middle distance races, and had dreams of becoming a sports coach. He competed in the All England Boys’ Athletics Championship, and was briefly a member of the Caius Amateur Boys’ Boxing Club. For a time in South London he maintained early friendships with the British welter weight boxing champion Peter Waterman, and the athlete Gordon Pirie. Eventually, all of this had to give way to a voracious love of live plays and most of his spare time and wages went on cheapest seats and long walks home across the city at night. Between sixteen and seventeen, Michael showed his own first plays to George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre, and Devine offered him a starting wage as an actor/writer at the theatre. On Friday mornings, Hastings regularly found himself in a line for his wage packet beside the eighty year old Shavian actor Esme Percy and the rest of the company. By twenty, Michael had three plays performed in London and New York, and although clearly gifted with a love for live performance, he remained a self-taught book junky.

Michael left home at seventeen and rented a room at 46, Brixton Hill. His landlady, Mrs Ball, took in actors who returned from the coast in the winter. With some money saved from a theatre production, Michael sailed to New York and stayed a year.

Hastings has, in recent times, pushed very hard to revive lost reputations of other artists and teachers- the painter David Bomberg, playwright Rodney Ackland and the U.N.I.A leader Marcus Garvey; perhaps it is noticeable how all of these men have had to struggle for light and knowledge against the run of the human tide.